I always wondered when I would begin to feel the biological urge to have a baby. When I was 25 and he was 28, my former partner told me that he wanted to have kids by his 30th birthday. Instead, when the day arrived, I threw him a surprise party and drank most of a…
My year of loss was bookended by two deaths. First was the passing of my grandmother in early spring—the kind of death that feels like an unwelcome but wholly natural conclusion to a long, full life. In the winter came the passing of my mother—the kind of death that doesn’t just suspend reality, but that…
There are very few times in life when you’re given the opportunity to start fresh. I’m not talking about showing up on the first day of school with the sense that you’ve completely reinvented yourself over the course of the summer, when you’re really just the same old you, only with freshly sharpened pencils and a…
I learned a number of difficult lessons on my twenty-first birthday—a day that I remember now in snapshots: Sitting impatiently behind a desk in espadrilles and my favorite dress, determined to start celebrating the moment my statistics exam was over. Dialing my long-distance boyfriend’s number again and again, my eyes searching the clouds for the…
I recently had the huge honor of meeting one of my personal heroes: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. Though I did once consider running for office, my admiration for Senator Warren isn’t purely political: There are few people out there today, in any field, who are able to set aside their fear of not being liked…
